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Sign Language
Where the great hands spell out the A to Z and a scatter clearly means scatter, a pinkie held to the heart then an eye means I see, the grammar of which doesn't matter: a non- restrictive relation's conveyed by a gesture; the face is the only true place for expressions of love, indecision, rapture; two hands brushing the air past the ears mean "You lost me," were over my head, while love still appears on the heart (two crossed hands), not in the head, and practice is one hand a plane planing the back of the other— We do so nearly believe we'll have said what we needed to say, with our long training. ©2000, from You've Just Been Told. Reprinted with permission of W. W. Norton & Company. Master Classes |
Written workYou've Just Been Told.
"I love Elizabeth Macklin's poems. I love the way they keep my mind and my heart moving between two places: the quotidian world and the world she makes of this world with her just-off-center imagination and her passionate intelligence."—Thomas Lux. A Woman Kneeling in the Big City
"These are poems with ... a dark wit which yokes together diesel exhaust and desperate regret, and downright cityscapes with poignant longing. No dissociation of sensibility here."—Eavan Boland. "Who Put the Code in the Dagoeneko?"
At first an essay in Barrow Street (Fall 2001), this has become a ongoing project. Periodically seemingly ever so slightly out of control, but to think it all started with the thought of "pre-translation." "It's a Woman's Prerogative to Change Her Mind" (2000)
"Perhaps a reader of By Herself will 'swerve' or 'veer' from thought to thought pleasurably, as ... Macklin recommends that women poets do, as writers, in her...opening essay..."—Molly McQuade, in her Introduction to By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry. |
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